I haven’t written much about the academic scandal at UNC-Chapel Hill, even though I got my master’s degree there, for one simple reason: I haven’t had a chance to read the Wainstein report, let alone the 900-page supplement, in which some of the worst dirt is said to be found. But what I have gleaned from media reports is bad enough: a rogue academic program of which a rogue athletic program took full advantage. There was an utter lack of institutional control — a lack that should lead to serious repercussions, and not only from the NCAA (as if).

What went on at UNC, involving roughly 3,100 students during an 18-year period, dwarfs what happened at Southern Methodist University, whose football program actually got the NCAA’s death penalty almost 30 years ago for paying 21 football players a total of $61,000. (That remains the only case in the modern era of the penalty’s being imposed on a Division I revenue-sport program.) If this doesn’t merit the NCAA’s death penalty, what does?

But I also think that this situation calls for God’s own proctological exam from the college’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. SACSCOC could, at the extreme, withdraw accreditation from UNC. Without accreditation, the university’s students no longer would be eligible for financial aid. And without that eligibility, much of the university would collapse from lack of cash. Large state universities are not as overwhelmingly dependent upon tuition revenue as are small, private colleges, but loss of accreditation would be an existential threat to UNC-Chapel Hill. And, frankly, I’m not sure it isn’t deserved.

I don’t say that lightly. I’m all too aware that the long knives already are out for the university at the hands of the state’s Republicans. And I acknowledge right up front that any such punishment would fall overwhelmingly on the heads of students, faculty, and staff who had nothing to do with the fraud and would suffer unjustly as a result. But I still think it needs to be said, needs to be talked about, because I’m not sure what else will get it through people’s heads, at Carolina and throughout college revenue sports, that if we’re going to have rules, we must abide by them. (Whether the rules we have are actually the rules we need is a separate discussion, albeit one I’m willing to enter with a very open mind.)

At UNC, although fewer than half the students involved were athletes, a disproportionate number of basketball players took advantage of sham classes in the African and Afro-American Studies department to remain academically eligible to play, including members of the 2005 national-championship team. And we’re being asked to believe that Coach Roy Williams and his predecessors — Matt Doherty, Bill Guthridge, even the sainted Dean Smith — didn’t know about it.

My friend and former colleague Ed Hardin says in today’s News & Record (column not online) that he believes Williams didn’t know, although he argues that Williams should have known. I don’t disagree with Ed lightly on matters athletic because he knows a hell of a lot more about them than I do. But I know deception as well as anyone. And what Williams says is too clever by half.

See, if he really didn’t know anything, then why would he admit that, as Ed puts it, “his only concern was that too many of his players were in the AFAM classes and that he never met with [whistleblower] Mary Willingham”? If he truly knew nothing, why even bring up those classes? If he truly were concerned with honesty, why not meet with Willingham?

No, I think Roy screwed up here in trying to make it look like he wasn’t completely an idiot. Unfortunately, complete idiocy is the only condition congruent with a claim that he knew nothing about the academic fraud. Otherwise, what he did amounts to willful ignorance, which, for a man in his position as head coach of a nationally ranked revenue-sport program, is complicity, full stop. Perhaps he might not have known all the details, but he had to know that his program was dirty and had been for years.

And as far as the bigger picture goes, we’ve basically been asked to believe that one rogue academic counselor and one rogue professor were the masterminds of a program through which 3,100 students over 18 years defrauded the university and were themselves defrauded in return. To put it politely, that hypothesis beggars belief. I think Roy knew, and Doherty, and Guthridge, and Smith. I think athletic director Bubba Cunningham knew, and John Swofford before him.

And I think the NCAA’s death penalty ought to be the least of UNC’s worries.

Late on the night of Sept. 30, with the federal government just hours away from shutting down, House Republicans quietly made a small change to the House rules that blocked a potential avenue for ending the shutdown.

It went largely unnoticed at the time. But with the shutdown more than a week old and House Democrats searching for any legislative wiggle room to end it, the move looms large in retrospect in the minds of the minority party.

“What people don’t know is that they rigged the rules of the House to keep the government shut down,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, told TPM in an interview. “This is a blatant effort to make sure that the Senate bill did not come up for a vote.” …

Here’s the rule in question:

When the stage of disagreement has been reached on a bill or resolution with House or Senate amendments, a motion to dispose of any amendment shall be privileged.

In other words, if the House and Senate are gridlocked as they were on the eve of the shutdown, any motion from any member to end that gridlock should be allowed to proceed. Like, for example, a motion to vote on the Senate bill. That’s how House Democrats read it.

But the House Rules Committee voted the night of Sept. 30 to change that rule for this specific bill. They added language dictating that any motion “may be offered only by the majority Leader or his designee.”

So unless House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted the Senate spending bill to come to the floor, it wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t.

“I’ve never seen this rule used. I’m not even sure they were certain we would have found it,” a House Democratic aide told TPM. “This was an overabundance of caution on their part. ‘We’ve got to find every single crack in the dam that water can get through and plug it.'”

Congressional historians agreed that it was highly unusual for the House to reserve such power solely for the leadership.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that before,” Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TPM.

Like this:

Wednesday, October 2, 2013 9:56 pm

I’ve posted several times in the past few years (here, here, here, here, and here) about the growing likelihood of a connection between playing pro football and a type of brain injury called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But between work and school, I never did get around to writing about the recent $765 million settlement between the NFL and former players that was supposed to put to rest allegations that pro football caused debilitating brain injuries. I personally had reservations about any settlement that allowed the NFL to keep its records secret, and I always meant to circle back to this but never did.

The National Football League conducted a two-decade campaign to deny a growing body of scientific research that showed a link between playing football and brain damage, according to a new book co-authored by a pair of ESPN investigative reporters.

The book, “League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth,” reports that the NFL used its power and resources to discredit independent scientists and their work; that the league cited research data that minimized the dangers of concussions while emphasizing the league’s own flawed research; and that league executives employed an aggressive public relations strategy designed to keep the public unaware of what league executives really knew about the effects of playing the game.ESPN The Magazine and Sports Illustrated published book excerpts on Wednesday morning.

The NFL’s whitewash of the debilitating neurological effects of playing football suffered by players began under former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who left office in 2006, but continued under his successor, current commissioner Roger Goodell, according to the book written by ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru.

The book, which will be released Tuesday by Crown Archetype, compares the NFL’s two decades of actions on health and safety to that of Big Tobacco — the group of cigarette-making corporations whose executives for years covered up the fact their products contained dangerous, addictive, potentially deadly and cancer-causing chemicals.

“There are many differences,” the Fainaru brothers write in “League of Denial,” “but one is that football’s health crisis featured not millions of anonymous victims but very public figures whose grotesque demises seemed almost impossible to reconcile with their personas.”

NFL executives declined to cooperate with the authors on the book. On Wednesday morning, league spokesman Greg Aiello declined to comment.

Among the major findings in “League of Denial,” which the Fainarus spent more than a year researching and writing:

• Two original members of a concussion committee established by Tagliabue disavowed the committee’s major findings, including the NFL’s assertion that concussions were minor injuries that never led to long-term brain injury.

• As far back as 1999, the NFL’s retirement board paid more than $2 million in disability payments to former players after concluding football gave them brain damage. But it would be nearly a decade before league executives would publicly acknowledge a link.

• Beginning in 2000, some of the country’s top neuroscientists warned the NFL that football led to higher rates of depression, memory loss, dementia and brain damage.

• The league in 2005 tried unsuccessfully to have medical journals retract the published work of several independent concussion researchers.

• Independent researchers directly warned Goodell about the connection between football and brain damage in 2007, but the commissioner waited nearly three years to acknowledge the link and to dismantle the league’s discredited concussion committee. In 2009, two other independent researchers delivered still more evidence that football caused brain damage during a private meeting at the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters. Yet the league committee’s co-chairman, Dr. Ira Casson, mocked and challenged the researchers so aggressively that he offended others who were present, including a Columbia University suicide expert and a U.S. Army colonel who directed the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

• As the crisis escalated, the NFL tried desperately to regain control of the issue and contain damage to its brand. Before an October 2009 hearing on football and brain injuries conducted by the House Judiciary Committee, the NFL lobbied successfully to prevent Goodell from testifying on the same panel as the father of a high school quarterback who had died after sustaining a concussion.

• Dr. Ann McKee, the leading expert on football and brain damage, told the authors that she believes the incidences of neurodegenerative disease among NFL players will prove to be “shockingly high” and that “most NFL players are going to get this. It’s just a question of degree.” Since 2005, when the disease was first diagnosed in deceased NFL players, McKee has studied 54 brains harvested from deceased NFL players. All but two had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). “I’m really wondering where this stops,” she told the Fainarus. “I’m really wondering if every single football player doesn’t have this.”

I am particularly struck by the very apt comparison of league officials to tobacco executives. The sole significant difference at this point is that league officials, to my knowledge, have not stood up and lied to Congress about what they knew.

But they’ve run all these smarmy promo ads about how concerned they are about preventing and treating concussions and teaching young kids heads-up tackling and all the rest. Meanwhile, they were just as aware as I and many others of what the research is showing us, which includes the fact that you don’t have to get a concussion, let alone multiple concussions, to sustain brain injury. There’s no technological fix on the horizon for that, and no way to change the game and still have it be recognized as football. Tagliabue and Goodell are guilty of, at the least, negligent homicide

This won’t kill the NFL, of course. But over a generation or two, potential players will drift to other sports, and the audiences with money will, too. The poor and desperate will be the only ones who play, and the NFL will fade into the shadows.

Before the 2008 crash, Spain was running a surplus, news that too frequently comes as a surprise to austerians. But it, like many other countries, was experiencing a housing bubble. That bubble was caused by many of the same bankers who are now insisting that Spain “take its medicine.” What should happen instead is that those bankers should take their medicine, including an outright scalping on their bond holdings. The Spanish people didn’t cause this problem, and visiting unnecessary pain and poverty on Spaniards will not get Spain out of this problem. If both economics and history are any guide, it’s more likely to lead to bankers dangling from lampposts than to economic prosperity in Spain. But nobody, not even bankers, believes that bankers act in their own best long-term interests all the time, mainly because they don’t. So here we are. Well, here the Spaniards are. And if the Republicans got their way, here we would be as well.

Why now, Jim? Didn’t bother you 12 years ago. Didn’t bother you all through the Bush administration. If you had the sense God gave a billy goat and/or were awake in eighth-grade civics, not only wouldn’t you have written the Patriot Act, you’d have opposed it with all your resources and at the top of your lungs, you sorry sack of slime. Lots of very smart people, plus me, told you at the time that this was a wrong call and that it would, inevitably, be misused to justify flat-out crimes. You ignored us. Well, screw you. I hope the government scooped up all your calls and I desperately hope that evidence of a serious crime lies therein. You bent the Bill of Rights over your desk and raped it. The rest of your life in prison is too good for you.

Michelle Rhee came to Ohio and lobbied my state legislature on her last national tour. She was treated like a celebrity. No one questioned any of her claims, which is unsurprising if you actually live in this state because all of her reforms involve union busting, pension looting and shifting public money to private operators(emphasis added). She’s a Right wing ideologue’s dream come true. They bought it because they believed it before she walked onto the floor that day.

The school reform industry response to the Atlanta cheating scandal was to call for better test security. As usual, the reform industry spokespeople are missing the larger point, the bigger picture. The truth is they based their reforms on high profile “turn arounds” in Atlanta and (especially) DC. If the scores in these places where they ran their experiments were bullshit, they “reformed” the US education system based on bullshit. They’re supposedly “data-driven” and most of them are billionaires. I shouldn’t have to point this out.

Hire an independent prosecutor like they did in Atlanta. Let’s find out. In the meantime, get a different opinion on “school reform.” Stop relying on the billionaires who backed this, the politicians who swallowed it without question, the hundreds of lobby shops who now exist because of it and the celebrities who promote it to evaluate it. They’re biased, they’re all in, they believe they are the “best and the brightest” and the top-tier analysts and executives are making a lot of money. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Well, disaster for ordinary taxpayers. For the grifters (and, remember, grifters are gonna grift), not so much.

… let me remark that the best way to insure against unemployment is to have no unemployment.* …

Next there is the spacious domain of public health. I was brought up on the maxim of Lord Beaconsfield which my father was always repeating: “Health and the laws of health.” We must establish on broad and solid foundations a national health service. Here let me say that there is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

Following upon health and welfare is the question of education…. In moving steadily and steadfastly from a class to a national foundation in the politics and economics of our society and civilization, we must not forget the glories of the past nor how many battles we have fought for the rights of the individual and for human freedom. We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except the politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges. I say “trying to build” because of all the races in the world our people would be the last to consent to be governed by a bureaucracy. Freedom is their life blood….

It is in our power, however, to secure equal opportunities for all. Facilities for advanced education must be evened out and multiplied. No one who can take advantage of higher education should be denied this chance. You cannot conduct a modern community except with an adequate supply of persons upon whose education, whether humanitarian, technical or scientific, much time and money have been spent….

Interesting, isn’t it, that those who now call themselves conservative are so actively fighting that for which Winston Churchill stood when few national leaders in history have been proven so right as he? Thom Tillis and Phil Berger, y’all might want to listen to and learn from your philosophical and moral better.

*That’s not as stupid as it sounds. In context, it means putting people to work even if doing so requires running larger deficits in the short term.

Back when Michelle Goldberg’s book “Kingdom Coming,” about the rise of Christian Nationalism in America, was published, I reviewed it for the News & Record and the blog I then wrote for the paper, The Lex Files. As you can see from the comments, as well as from this site, I took a lot of grief for stating, on the basis of my own reporting on the subject and my familiarity with some of Goldberg’s original sources, that there were significant numbers of people in America who wished to turn this country from a secular, constitutional democratic republic to a Dominionist theocracy; that is, a country where the law is based strictly on the Christian Bible.

Impossible, they said.

(You’ll also note that they accused me of saying all evangelical Christians want this. Rather, I said a certain subset of evangelical Christians adhered to that ideology. I didn’t believe all of them did then, I don’t believe that all of them do now, and I said so at the time specifically, not least because Goldberg herself was very careful to draw that distinction.)

Well, as it happens, down in Salisbury, the Rowan County commissioners want to be able to pray to Jesus in their official capacities, and so a bill, House Joint Resolution 494, has been introduced in the N.C. legislature that would allow that and much more besides.

This bill claims that the First Amendment’s ban on government making law “respecting an establishment of religion” applies only to the federal government, not the states, because in the minds of the (blessedly few) 11 sponsors signing on so far, the Fourteenth Amendment, whose equal protection clause extends the protection of federal law to every citizen of the country, never happened.

It’s tempting to call these people batshit crazy and let it go at that. Tempting though that approach is, however, it lets them off too lightly. This is an attempt to turn one state among 50 in a constitutionally established secular democratic republic into a Dominionist theocracy in violation of the very Constitution the legislators have sworn an oath to uphold. They should be impeached and removed from office. Unfortunately, we don’t impeach legislators in North Carolina because we can’t. The best we could hope for would be for the House to vote to expel the offending members. But it won’t, because whether they’re ready to admit it or not, a majority of the N.C. House, or very close to a majority, thinks this is a great idea.

It would never stand up in court, I’d like to think. But “never” is a long time, and the Dominionists are playing the long game. They must be called out and they must be stopped, if for no other reason that Jesus had very specific notions about where one ought to do one’s praying and it would be a shame if our fellow North Carolinians went to hell for disregarding that directive.